CES Wrap-Up: Your questions answered

Q: crazypenguin (and Momento Mori, Kamahl, darkiewonder, Chaos911, and a *lot* more) asked about LittleBigPlanet.
This was probably the number 1 request for info at CES. Fortunately, that’s what we focused on the most at Sony Computer Entertainment. Personally, this was the longest amount of time I’ve spent with the game, and I’m starting to see how deep it is. And I’m already excited, thinking about some of the levels I want to create. Videos here and here.

Q: cmargary (and C-h-a-o-s, Darkus, and others) asked about Skype for the PSP.
Skype on the PSP turned into a pretty big story at CES, and for good reason. See the video here. It’s a nice bit of functionality for PSP Slim owners. Look for it to hit by the end of the month.

Q: EnigmaOppanax (Nebo, Stoffinator, Mitsugeta, and others) asked about Metal Gear Solid 4.
MGS4 was actually being demoed at the Sony pavilion, and consistently drew large crowds. For good reason, of course. I was told that the demo was similar to the one shown at TGS, meaning most attendees were playing it for the first time. It of course looked very impressive. My favorite little detail: the way Snake gingerly stepped over a corpse on the street. It was the type of realistic movement and attention to detail that has me – and millions of others – really excited for the game.

Dubbedinenglish asked me to steal the demo. Sorry, dude.

Q: OrganicShadow (and tecknical and others) asked about DualShock3 controllers.
The one DS3 at the show was being used for the MGS4 demo. No new info released. It feels good, though. IGN agrees.

Q: ISEMAN (and lostboy85, THATPSPGUY, brandothe2nd, MUGEN02, and others) asked for footage and pics of the new Sony OLED TVs.
OK, here you go. 3 mm thick!! You may wanna take this with a grain of salt, seeing as where I work – but for my money, the OLEDs were the single most impressive thing to me at CES. I probably saw 10,000 TVs this week, and the picture on the OLED was easily the best. Like looking through a window.

Q: Soong said “It would be nice if you didn’t just concentrate on Sony stuff. I don’t mean loads of Wii/360 stuff but some general tech news would be good.”
I’ll leave most of that to the experts at CNET, Engadget, etc. But one of the more interesting non-game (but game related) items I saw/tried out at CES was the myvu personal media viewer. These sunglasses (model below) allow you to hook in A/V cables to watch or play games in the privacy of your own head. I tried out Guitar Hero III with these shades, and it actually worked pretty well. However, I noticed that I tend to bob my head when I play that game, and it’s a bit strange since the picture follows you.

Q: mattyInkWell said “I think you should go to a gentlemens club and enjoy yourself:) I want a full report from there!!”
Do they have that sort of thing in Vegas?

Q: P_tear_griffin asked about an “8GB or more memory stick pro duo?”How about 16 GB?

Q: etompkin said “I wish you would put your press conferences on PSN as a download.”
I’ll inquire about the possibility, but if you’d like to see the initial Jan 6th press conference, click here.

Q: THATPSPGUY said “Oh Jeff, the most important thing to take PICTURES of is: BOOTH BABES in skimpy outfits…”
You’re trying to get me in trouble.

Q: Shane-O-Mak said “How about a release date on Sony’s GPS unit and software for the PSP. I’m soo excited, I already have the Sony GPS-290 unit now I’ll soon hopefully have Sony’s mapping software for it in the U.S. YEAH!!!”
Later this year for the GPS. One company actually was marketing a dashboard bracket for the PSP, presumably for that very reason.

I hope that answers your question. A lot of you asked about Home, but there wasn’t any news on that – this really was a Sony Electronics show, with LittleBigPlanet serving as our featured title. Expect much, much, much more gaming content at next month’s GDC.

So what impressed you at CES? Vote at our new poll on the right side of the Blog.

Special thanks to Justin Massongill (still photos), Vince Grato (video), and to all of you who read the blog postings and watched the videos.

I got a real good question for you Jeff and I hope you can answer it for me or someone in the SCEA can. I was just wondering we all ask for In-Game XMB (CrossMediaBar) but I never see people asking for a bigger friend list, like at least 90-100 friends will be really good since that the network is getting so big and full new users. I would really appreciate it if I can get a good answer about this.

How about in game XMB? That was briefly addressed wasn’t it? Oh and for anyone with questions concerning the DualShock 3, I was an early adopter and its a fantastic controller that is definitely worth your buck. Now get Call of Duty 4 to support it!

As you know, Sony announced that the Skype IP phone service will be joining the growing list of PSP features.

Skype will be added soon to your PSP following a firmware update.

Unfortunately for most PSP owners, this ad has no meaning, since this functionality will only work in the new PSP model slim&light.

Last year, Sony as also launch the 1seg TV Tuner in Japan that also only works with the new PSP Slim. Now is Skype, tomorrow what will be?

What Sony is trying to do with this restriction we do not know for sure. What we know is that over 80% of the PSP userbase has the original PSP Model. Is this a new strategy by Sony in order to encourage the purchase of the new model by the old owners?

This petition is addressed to all PSP Owners, which invested much money in the purchase of the machine and its games, and we now feel disappointed with this discrimination. Through this petition we want Skype and any functionality in the future to be launched for all PSP Models.

We therefore to all PSP owners to sign this petition and make themselves heard. We are many and our protest will be heard.

No offense or anything but the petitions are a F’en waste of F’en time…just like the PS2 the first gen PSP’s life will end…get over it and buy a new PSP

I only wish SONY had that same F U attitude with the PS2…then maybe people would have some incentive to switch to the PS3…but then again why switch to a machine thats getting no love from SONY?

SONY should just discontinue all the SKU’s already since its pretty obvious the PSN isnt going to improve much, the PS3 wont upscale its own games anytime soon, or get games made in FULL HD anytime soon or have in-game xmb access anytime soon…or get any of the games that were supposed to be released at launch or in 2007 anytime soon…see a pattern anyone???

You SHOULD make some kind of poll or something like that to know what else the gamers want besides the music and the messaging.

As a suggestion, you could install Xfire in the PS3 and allow it to be used with the In-Game XMB.
The SDK for PS3 includes everything needed to make a game compatible with Xfire, but so far few games have used it. Integrating Xfire (in the PS3 itself) would allow players to chat with their friends playing on PC’s/PS3’s, while getting playing hours.

This is something Sony SHOULD use, considering Sony is already in a partnership with Xfire.

So… your advice is they don’t make more ps3 then? that’s your solution?

The PSN I just try to think is the store because the online play is just perfect if you ask me… the fault is the games in it… like warhawk, or the new resistance… 60 players online and 8 co-op is just crazy….

The home will be a lot of improvement, isn’t just a social network if you look at it more, is just one of many things of home, I want you to look more at it… and @ #70 you can see one of the last announcement of home, you can even create minigames at HOME. Home is one of the keys of advertisement for them, just like the xbox have in the front page just in another level, they will have the archievement like system that xbox have since day one. You see, home is key in the ps3 that they need to release it perfectly…

Beside of home, The Ps3 have so many titles this year, you can’t name one in the 360 that can be a console seller if you ask me and you know that I’m a xbox owner first that the ps3, so nothing of fanboy here, I always think that the ps3 in the past was only a multimedia machine.

In the Demos, arcade games and the store interface is where they need to improve of course but the demos will come when a game comes out too and the arcade games well, I like the idea that quality is better than quantity,
the only game that I miss is UNO and because here we play it a lot.

What Sony need to work is that all the games need to be full HD, many people have TVs that only have a 1080 resolution and they are stuck in a sd game and thats a shame. This and the delays is what sony need to work out… just my opinion anyway and I don’t bach you because anyone have a different way of think

What are you’s talking about that Sony don’t have any HD games 720p is HD dummy. Yea there ain’t no full 1080p games out for PS3 exclusively but at least at Sony our games are full HD unlike Halo 3 which was only like 680p or something like that and was “UPSCALED” to 720p, and your gonna talk like that when in the beggining MS said games can’t be in 1080p and you don’t need HDMI but after all of that, they go ahead and put HDMI in there systems and still is a older version of HDMI.

i did mean the store when i said PSN…but you cant compare the sony store to xbl…xbl just kills it…the sony store is just so cheezy “little effort” looking in comparison and thats without comparing the content of each.

Resistance 2 sounds sick…granted 60 player maps is just unecessary and asking for TONS of lag…i enjoyed the first one though but if the 2nd is in 720 like the first then im not buying it…i began my boycott of 720 games in like july so basically i havent played a SONY game since…until i got Uncharted for xmas which i enjoyed but i refuse to spend my own $ on a game until SONY can either A.) develope a game in 1080 or B.) make the PS3 upscale it to 1080

oh and the reason why i said to discontinue it all LOL was becuz after 14 months of being out 2 models have already been discontinued and yet the launch 60gb was the BEST of all 4 but kiss that s*** goodbye…at least i know i own the best and last of its kind but i look at this as SONY has just been making mistake after mistake with its system so rather then keep making mistake after mistake they should just stop…the future doesnt look any brighter then the launch…games arent up to par…system doesnt have the features yet that most consumers want some of which were supposed to be included @ launch

i get annoyed when i hear things like “YAY…sales are up”…so what…you sold more crappy systems…yay!…no one can count on a game coming out on time or even before the 360…but you can count on 360 havin it b4 PS3…and the exclusives…well thats a whole different ballgame…delay after delay after delay after delay after delay…should i keep going??

its funny how at one point in time i would have joined any group that wanted to bomb MS HQ and i would have done it decked out in SONY gear….LOL…i can actually thank my ex for something good cuz if i hadnt gotten that 360 i wouldnt have even known how bad the 360 makes the PS3 look

@Lex_Yayo_407

regardless of what the actual resolution of Halo 3 is the point is the 360 upscales it and does that quite well which is way more then i can say for the PS3

half that list had original 2007 release dates and now look at LBP, Killzone MGS4 already pushed further back in 2008 whos to say they wont be pushed further back the closer we get to September…and GT5 is slated for December (prologue is gay im not paying $40 for an extended demo) so do you really think that date is not gonna change? i hated motostorm so the 2nd does not appeal to me and like i mentioned b4 if Resistance 2 is in 720 and the PS3 doesnt upscale then SONY will not get my $

so with all those titles you mentioned…to me it doesnt make 2008 any better but 2009 is lookin ok!!

All this is great and everything, but how about Sony get right what is currently on the PS3 before moving off to something else. My biggest gripe is the fact I cannot enjoy the Internet through the PS3 the way I should be able to because the Flash needs to be updated and I keep getting memory errors when trying to visit so many sites. Also, the biggest bug about the browser is I can’t even post to the Playstation site without having to go to my computer. Even the videos on the Playstation site wont play on their own browser. Now, how pathetic is that? Come on! I want to be able to surf the Web from my PS3 properly.

I read that Sony announced that its Blu-Ray movies would ship with a low-res version of the movie for copying onto the PSP for instance. Any tech-spec for this feature anywhere? I am working on making multimedia software for embedded devices and it would be great to know what is needed to support these low-res copies in terms of resolution, codecs, container format and (hopefully not) DRM.

You have to agree that the xbox360 launch many 360s too… it’s just the same, to make the system better or to make more cheap… the 360 with and without the hardrive, the elite, the arcade one and in the ces they said they will release another one. If the PS3 release another PS3 with the antenna in for the TIVO thing and with an usb in the back I will just trade or give it to someone to buy that one… hate to have the camara with the usb connector in the front where everyone will see it and it’s ugly in there…

Another thing… you had lag in resistance? I think that 40 works more than perfect in resistance and if a fighting game like tekken can be played without lag that need the frames to be perfect why not 60 players online? of course if someone doesn’t have a good bandwidth of course will lag, the PSN doesn’t make miracles either…

What I still agree with you is with the store and that the games doesn’t upscale to HD if the TV only supports 1080 and the game doesn’t…

I’m not sure if you actually read comments that far down but, I’d like to know if there are any words on animated PS3 themes coming? Is that even possible?
Most likely it is since the original theme is animated.